He sits back on the hard wooden bench as the sun lazily sets in Central Park. Like any other normal human being, his emotional state of mind is almost entirely reactionary; if he has just eaten a delicious meal at his favorite restaurant, he is likely to be a pretty happy camper. Though, what he has realized in the course of his seemingly endless lifetime is that he has a certain degree of influence on these emotional responses. In fact, he has managed to contrive a belief-system that allows him to respond with happiness to anything that may transpire before him.

He quickly glances at a disheveled homeless woman begging those around her to contribute a couple cents. He smiles. What a free soul, he thinks; free from the suffocating pressures that comes with any job in this market. Freedom always makes me happy, he thinks.

He then casually observes a girl, of about college age, chasing after a wicked seeming man clutching a fancied up purse. Even wicked seeming men must have enough to eat and must earn a living, he remarks to himself. The success of others is always a positive, he affirms, as he sinks back into his state of euphoria.

Finally, he watches two fully-grown men ferociously attack each other on the freshly cut New York grass. Suddenly, the smaller of the two men pulls out a knife and ends the fistfight. Taken aback by what he has just done, the small man rushes away from the scene. Ah, the perfectly always-happy man ponders, this man will surely learn his lesson, about death and about proportion. Education to this degree must be a cause for happiness, no?

At the other end of the bench, a perceptive bystander looks aghast at the responses of this man. “How can you react so inhumanely to all that has just occurred before us?” the bystander asks. It is hardly difficult, responds the man. All you have to do is believe in your heart of hearts that what is happening now is for the best; that no other sequence of events could possibly be better. Once you hold complete certainty in this doctrine, the emotions will take care of themselves: The natural emotional response to a perfectly good sequence of events is happiness, is it not? It is hardly difficult, responds the man, to be perfectly always-happy.